Yemen's Public Works Minister Praises China's Role in Rebuilding the Country's Road Network

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Yemen’s Minister of Public Works and Roads, Hussein al-Aqrabi, has praised China’s long-running contribution to the country’s road network during a virtual meeting with Shao Cheng, the Chinese Charge d’Affaires in Yemen, the state news agency Saba reported. The minister thanked Beijing for what he described as decades of support to the Yemeni people and for assistance sustained through a period in which most large infrastructure programmes in the country have stalled.

Al-Aqrabi has held the public works and roads portfolio in the government seated in Aden and has spent much of the past year attempting to restart projects frozen by the war. The ministry’s stated plan for 2026 centres on restoring strategic road corridors and the outlets that connect them to ports and border crossings, completing works that were abandoned mid-construction, and improving the condition of urban streets in the main cities under government control.

China’s diplomatic footprint in Yemen has been reduced since 2015, when Beijing evacuated its nationals and scaled back embassy operations as the war intensified. Its mission has since been represented at charge d’affaires level, and Shao Cheng has been unusually visible in that role, holding meetings over the past year with Yemen’s foreign minister, deputy foreign minister, defence minister and information minister, as well as with the chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council.

The historical reference points behind al-Aqrabi’s remarks are substantial. Chinese engineering teams worked in Yemen from the late 1950s and through the 1960s on some of the country’s first modern highways, including the road linking Sanaa to the Red Sea port of Hodeidah, a project that remains one of the most frequently cited examples of early Chinese development work in the Arabian Peninsula. Yemeni officials have marked more than seventy years of diplomatic relations with China, and infrastructure has been a recurring theme throughout.

More recent cooperation has been modest by comparison and weighted towards humanitarian rather than capital spending. Yemen and China have signed a development cooperation agreement reported at fifty million yuan, and a Chinese grant channelled through the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation was announced earlier this year to fund humanitarian relief and development programmes. Neither the Saba account of this meeting nor any accompanying statement disclosed a figure, a timetable or a named project.

Roads occupy an outsized place in Yemen’s recovery arithmetic. More than a decade of fighting has destroyed bridges, cratered trunk routes and left long stretches of the network divided across front lines, forcing freight onto lengthy detours that add days to journeys and inflate the cost of everything carried on them. Because Yemen imports the overwhelming majority of its food and fuel, the price of road transport feeds almost directly into the price of a household’s basic basket, and humanitarian agencies have repeatedly identified access constraints as a limit on how much aid actually reaches people.

Within that context, al-Aqrabi’s ministry has concentrated on a handful of visible schemes. He has inspected the rehabilitation of the Heijjat al-Abd road in Taiz alongside the provincial governor, reviewed paving work in Lahj with Governor al-Halimi, and chaired the board of the Road Maintenance Fund, the body responsible for financing routine upkeep. He has also pressed for the transfer of central weighbridge revenues to that fund, a technical change that would give the ministry a more predictable income stream for maintenance.

Financing remains the central constraint, and the ministry has been courting several partners at once. A memorandum signed with Saudi Arabia’s ambassador covers road infrastructure and broader economic recovery, and al-Aqrabi has separately discussed cooperation on roads and infrastructure with the German and Libyan ambassadors. Set against that, a virtual courtesy meeting with a charge d’affaires is a slighter event, though it keeps a channel open with a donor whose historical involvement in Yemeni roads gives it particular credibility on the subject.

What the meeting does not yet represent is a commitment. No new Chinese-funded road project has been announced, no sum has been attached to the discussion, and the ministry has not indicated that engineering studies are under way for any specific corridor. Meetings of this kind are a routine part of the Aden government’s effort to demonstrate international engagement, and they frequently precede nothing concrete.

The political geography also complicates any such undertaking. The internationally recognised government operates from Aden while the Houthi authorities control Sanaa and much of the northern highlands, which means the trunk network that Chinese engineers helped build in the 1960s now runs across a line of control. Any programme aimed at the national road system, rather than at government-held segments of it, would require an understanding between the two sides that does not currently exist. Reconnecting Sanaa to the southern governorates by road has been discussed intermittently in United Nations-facilitated contacts, but progress has been incremental and reversible.

For now, the practical significance is limited to the diplomatic signal. Yemeni ministers have spent the past year seeking to convert expressions of goodwill into funded work, with mixed results, and the road file is where that gap between intention and delivery is most visible to ordinary travellers. Whether this exchange produces anything beyond a communique will depend on decisions taken well above the level at which it was held.